'Just be nice, cook, and have sex!'

There is a lot of Steve Harvey in Suzanne Venker’s new book, How To Choose a Husband, a 12-step guide for women seeking a lasting union in a culture that prepares them for anything but. The comedian and Family Feud host is quoted as an expert on marital sex: “Please—puhleeze—don’t hold out on the cookie. We don’t care about anything else.” Harvey on manhood: “Everything [a man] does is filtered through his title (who he is), how he gets that title (what he does), and the reward he gets for the effort (how much he makes). These three things make up the basic DNA of manhood.” And Harvey on female power: “Your power comes from one simple thing: you’re a woman….you’re the ultimate prize for us.”

Clearly Venker, a conservative writer who made a splash late last year with her trolling FoxNews.com essay, “The War on Men,” has done her homework for this latest entry in the burgeoning academic field of “Marriage is Dying!!!!” So it’s a real shame to find that all of the hours she spent whittling down her Netflix queue, the bathroom time she devoted to reading celebrity magazines as she pooped out roses on her lady throne, and the minutes—all those minutes!—she passed Googling “Marcia Cross and fertility” and surfing Facebook were in the service of this conclusion: The best way to bag a husband is to detox from feminism, “return to femininity,” tune out your mom and friends, stay away from pop culture, don’t shack up without a ring, “marry the accountant, not the artist.” And once you do find a man: Be sweet, give him lots of sex, and don’t talk too much.